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Labyrinth of Solitude

In december 1997, a man with the wonderfully aztec and spanish name Cuauhtemoc Cardenas became the Mayor of Mexico City and initiated a series of reforms, one of which, the most delicate of all, took place in plain view. It was an earnest municipal campaign to clear the unlicensed sidewalk vendors from the downtown zone around Mexico City's central plaza, the Zocalo. Sidewalk vending in that particular neighborhood is an ancient custom. In Aztec times, when Mexico City already figured as one of the world's largest cities, a market stood on that very spot, near the Main Temple on one side of the plaza. And the vendors have never disappeared. Photographs from the 19th century show what the vendors look like today: a lone person, often a woman, squatting by a tiny carpet on the sidewalk, displaying a pathetic handful of goods for sale.

Sidewalk vending, when times are good, can offer a useful way for a hard-strapped person to earn a few honest pesos. But times have not been good. Mexico City's population, always enormous, hasin recent years swollen to 8.5 million in the Federal District (where Cardenas is mayor), plus another 10 million outside the district lines.

Then, in 1994, the entire country underwent a series of disasters. There were Zapatista guerrillas in the southern state of Chiapas. There were narco-traffickers in the north. There was a peso crisis, which produced an economic depression. There were assassinations and money scandals at the loftiest levels of the federal Government.

In Mexico City, a vague, shapeless social collapse was under way. The number of holdups, rapes and murders became truly terrifying, not just in the poor neighborhoods. And sidewalk vending around the Zocalo grew to proportions that no one had ever seen, and took on sinister colors.

What was the origin of those many disasters? In Cardenas's view, it lies in Mexico's political system and especially in its ruling party, the PRI (pronounced pree, from the Spanish initials for Institutional Revolutionary Party). The PRI is like nothing the United States has ever known. It is a political party, run by ordinary politicians, but it is also a mass organization, spread across a vast geography of business groups, trade unions, storefront service centers and poor people's associations, all of them linked in underground networks of ''corruption and complicities,'' in Cardenas's description.

The party has known how to stay in power for almost 70 years -- either by winning popular support, or by winning fixed elections, or (when not even a fixed election will do) by violent repression. Cardenas was a PRI man himself in the past. But 10 years ago, having lost his faith, he left the party and set out to overthrow it. For a long time he seemed to get nowhere at all. Then last year's elections turned out to be amazingly free, and even fair, apart from the PRI-controlled television and press coverage and a few old-fashioned irregularities in the southern states. Cardenas, as the new Mayor, found himself occupying Mexico's second most visible office, after the presidency.

His Party of the Democratic Revolution captured the city council, plus a number of other offices around the country. A second opposition party -- a right-wing movement, in contrast to Cardenas's left-wing movement -- likewise advanced, mostly in the north. Mexico held its breath. Everyone understood that, in spite of the elections, the PRI remained the country's dominant political organization. In Mexico, presidents rule like kings, and the PRI still controls the presidency, in the person of Ernesto Zedillo, who has held the office since 1994. But in the year 2000, there will be a new election for President.

Short of some awful new development, that election, too, will probably be free -- possibly even fair, more or less. Cardenas, if he does well as Mayor, will be a strong candidate. Already there are polling statistics that show him to be the front-runner -- though other opposition candidates have stepped forward. And, with Cardenas in City Hall, suddenly it became obvious that, like so many other authoritarian countries during the last revolutionary decade, Mexico, too, might be plunging at last into democracy and modern life -- a thrilling thing to watch, but also slightly alarming.

It has to be said that in his first months in office, out of nervousness or bad luck, Cardenas has not in fact done especially well. He made a series of early appointments that turned out to be ill advised and had to be withdrawn. His chief of staff made wild and unjustified accusations against the PRI (instead of sober and accurate accusations, which would have been wild enough), and had to resign. The new Mayor did take some useful steps -- he tried to shore up the leaky water system, initiated a reform of the police (many of whom are criminals themselves), ordered an end to bribes (though bribery has always been how things get done). Yet none of that attracted any attention. Then he sent the police into the downtown streets to arrest a few sidewalk vendors and confiscate their paltry merchandise.

In mid-April of this year, some scuffling broke out between vendors and police. In response, a committee of shopkeepers decided to add pressure of their own by calling on their fellow shopkeepers to close their stores to protest against the sidewalk vendors and encourage the Mayor in his campaign. It was not much of a demonstration, by the standards of the Zocalo -- where, on the day of the shopkeepers' protest, hundreds of Indians continued a months-long marathon sit-in on behalf of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, and hundreds of other people persisted in a similar marathon in the name of Pancho Villa for the right to squat on city-owned land, and still others kept up a months-long picket line against the labor policies of the Zocalo's famous National Pawnshop. The shopkeepers' demonstration, by humble contrast, was intended to last a single lunch hour, and failed even at that.

A mere handful closed their doors and faithfully attended their committee's rally, on Calle Corregidora, the street running behind the National Palace. Still, a group of journalists came out to report on the latest protest, and 23 police officers arrived to keep the peace, should the peace have needed keeping. Then a mob of 400 thugs came running down the street and tore

the shopkeepers' tiny demonstration to shreds. The television news that night showed enraged young toughs racing into a store and hurling things. It was a full-scale riot, except that riots tend to be spontaneous, and in the days after the mob attack on Calle Corregidora, no one believed that anything spontaneous had occurred.

I went tramping around after Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in the next few days, just to see how he was going to respond to that first, violent challenge to his administration. I could see that people reacted powerfully to him. He toured an elevated section of a new metro line under construction, and a group of men in the street below rooted him on by chanting his first name: ''Kwow-TAY-mock! Kwow-TAY-mock!'' He sat with me in the booth of a middle-class restaurant, talking about Nafta (he supports it, with grave reservations), immigration (he thinks the United States and Mexico have failed to discuss it adequately) and military interventions (he thinks every country is capable of solving its own problems and ought to be left alone, especially by the United States). And, as he chatted and sipped his coffee, diners got up from their tables to shake his hand and introduce their children -- a steady trickle of excited voters, thrilled at the historic opportunity to be in physical contact with their hero.

Exactly what quality in him set off those responses was hard to see. He cut the ribbon on a new orphanage, listened to 10-year-olds deliver orations that must have been written by the teachers' union, visited the city council -- and, in each of those settings, he seemed grave and tranquil, but also melancholy beyond words, as if never once in his 64 years has he enjoyed a cheerful moment. Iron weights seemed to pull the sides of his mouth down toward his chin. His oratory followed a rhythmic pattern that emphasized every eighth or ninth syllable, which, after a few minutes, got to be grating. In my hearing he never did say anything memorable. At City Hall, when he got up to leave a meeting, the reporters mobbed him so tightly as to pin his arms, and thrust their plastic tape recorders at his melancholy face, and called out questions about street vendors. And like a bored sheriff announcing the day's eviction, he replied that Mexico City has an ordinance against sidewalk vending downtown, and the law must be respected.

He was more voluble with me, if only for the purpose of making an abstract point. ''The first step that has to be taken in Mexico,'' he said, as one person after another hurried to our table to eye their new Mayor or pump his hand, ''is to re-establish, to recover, a state of law. To make the law prevail over any other interests. To make the authorities respect the law, and make everyone respect it.'' He was always courteous. But he was never warm. He visited a welfare center for what the Mexicans call indigenous people, meaning the Indians. And when the speeches were over, he found himself for a brief instant alone on the sidewalk with a short, squat woman, dressed in a white skirt and yellow apron, with a gray-and-white rebozo and bright colored ribbons tied to her black braid -- the costume of the Mazahua people. Almost pleading, she said, ''Can't you find a kindness for the sidewalk vendors who are indigenous?''

The Mayor gazed down at her and said, for her ears alone, ''The law must be respected'' -- and added not a word of reassurance.

Only what did that mean -- to respect the law? It meant daily police raids. I joined one of those. Some 90 police officers gathered in front of the tumbledown cathedral in the Zocalo -- the Public Transit inspectors in T-shirts, the Judicial Police in blue uniforms, the police grenadiers (some of them women) in helmets and shields, plus a couple of officials from the city administration. The column divided in two, and my own group went marching past the picket line at the National Pawnshop, down Calle Tacuba, where a few dozen police officers went charging into a building and up the stairs, past the warrens of offices and work-shops, looking for hidden stashes of vendor merchandise.

We came upon a few racks of clothes, which were deemed suspicious, and the police laboriously hauled these racks down to the sidewalk and loaded them on trucks, which wended slowly behind us. We looked like a Roman legion, marching by in our armor with a train of looted merchandise following in the rear. The crowds on the street pretended not to notice us. And when the police operation ended for the day, I went wandering by myself back through the district we had just raided and discovered that hordes of vendors had flooded the sidewalk and clothes racks were lining the street, and the hawkers were shouting ''Bargain!'' -- as if the Mayor had initiated no policy at all and our Roman legion had never existed.

According to government figures, there are precisely 97,951 sidewalk vendors in Mexico City's Federal District. If you wander into the streets behind the National Palace, though, 97,951 vendors are plainly at work on every block. That part of Mexico City is amazing to see. You are never very far from the 16th and 17th centuries there. On quite a few buildings the plaster facades have chipped away, and you can observe exactly how the buildings were made -- the quarried stone foundations, the uncut rocks on the first floor, adobe on the second: the construction techniques of centuries ago.

Some of those buildings were Spanish palaces in their time, and the ancient wooden portals, the upstairs balconies and the classical pilasters are still intact. Here and there you stumble on a church in the 18th-century Baroque style, its every stone inch carved in some mad design or other, half Spanish and half Aztec. Because of the venerable age of those buildings, though, and because Mexico City is sinking into its own subsoil (the water system is draining off the underground water supply), and because of earthquakes now and then, the walls and windows and doorways in that district have tended over the years to shed, ever so gracefully, their right angles.

The entire district illustrates Balzac's observation that buildings, as they age, take on human qualities. You get the impression that a given edifice in front of you is a Castilian gentleman with a sunken nose, and across the way stands his elegant friend, who appears to be distinctly Arabic, but has unfortunately gone blind with age (as you can tell from the broken panes on the second floor, behind the iron balustrade). Directly behind the National Palace stands the austere Old Temple of Santa Teresa, except that, after too many years of standing up, the temple has decided to sit down. And all of those buildings, even the most aristocratic, except for the churches, have long ago had to abandon their finer pretensions in favor of the humblest of commercial occupations -- a sad end for such distinguished and elderly creatures.

The commercial activities follow the geographic logic of any great city. On Calle de la Santisima you find a set of stores devoted to retailing the products of Oaxaca, and on Calle Corregidora you find the plumbing district, together with the hardware district and the kitchen-appliance district. The biggest district of all, with centers on Calle Mixcalco and elsewhere, is devoted to textiles and garments -- street-level stores and upstairs factories, staffed here and there by Lebanese and even by a handful of Syrian Jews, chatting in Arabic by telephone. And throughout those several commercial zones, in luxuriant growths, like some awful weed that has exploded into obscene fecundity, you find the sidewalk vendors.

The vendors lay down their little carpets and offer their wares in no visible order -- wooden handicrafts, toy airplanes, ladies' purses, tape cassettes, foods, shriveled oranges waiting to be squeezed into juice, electric plugs, pink plastic dinosaurs, embroidered blouses, double-A batteries. The Volkswagen taxis can barely push their way up the street -- those same taxis that are driven, notoriously, by muggers and gangsters (in the first four months of 1998 alone, more than 650 tourists were assaulted by Mexico City's taxi drivers). Pedicabs from the Zocalo find themselves blocked completely, and the young drivers rise up on their pedals to peer over the crowd and grimace in frustration.

The alarm-clock vendors keep their bells eternally ringing, and the music-tape vendors blare out mariachi and merengue tunes. Hefty women dressed in smocks of blue, pink or yellow, with checkered aprons, mind their merchandise with a jealous eye, stuffing their coins in some inner pocket or purse and haggling over prices. Men shout out their goods in a penetrating nasal tone. And everywhere you see the young thugs simmering in the doorways (the streets behind the National Palace have the highest crime rates in the city), and the prostitutes standing guard in front of grim hotels with broken windows, and a sea of people surging in all directions.

The chaos is overwhelming. I studied the savvy reports in La Jornada and some of the other papers, though, and I listened to my helpful friends and colleagues from the City Hall press room, and I kept walking around the district, buying trinkets and talking to the vendors and chatting with the police. And at last it dawned on me that, instead of chaos, I was seeing in those downtown streets two distinct commercial systems at work. There was the formal commercial system of the stores, where people pay taxes and follow the laws, or at least would, if Mexico City were a law-abiding place. And there is the commercial system of the sidewalk vendors, who get their merchandise from God knows where, and pay no taxes, not even theoretically, and stand wholly outside the law. In all of Mexico, a full half of the work force is said to be engaged in what is called the informal economy -- the smuggled, the stolen, the illegal and the merely extralegal, a gigantic invisible economic empire. And in the teeming streets behind the capital city's main plaza the invisible economy's national retail center stretches before you.

On those streets, chaos, to borrow a phrase from Carlos Monsivais, is the perfection of order. For in the zone behind the Zocalo, not one thing is out of place, if you know what you are looking at. Every square foot of commercially viable pavement has been carefully parceled out, as if through a system of lease agreements, by a series of vendor guilds. The guilds are patriotic and populist organizations with grandiose names like the Benito Juarez Association of Small Merchants, Semistationary, Unsalaried, and the Guadalupe Duarte Unifying Front for Commerce in the Mexican Republic. They defend the impoverished sidewalk merchants. They cry out against injustice.

But mostly these guilds are business associations, of the kind that make offers you can't refuse. They have the reputation of using musclemen from their own organizations, or else huge street gangs called the 10, the Stubborn and the Panamanians to enforce their offers. The police figure in the system, too -- one street gang more, with the snappiest uniforms. And at the head of the vendor guilds and their enforcement mechanisms stand a series of feared and fearsome bosses -- who, through some peculiarity of Latin American tradition, tend to be women.

On Calle Corregidora the ruling guild is called the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced. The vendors on that street might make $5 or $10 in the course of a long day, yet out of that pathetic income have to pay a dollar or more to the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced, just for the right to spread their carpets across the pavement. There is resentment over these daily payments. And there is fear of getting beaten by the musclemen. Some of the vendors were reluctant to talk to me. Then I met a man who had spent 16 years selling ladies' undergarments in front of a hardware store on Calle Corregidora and had nothing but praise for the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced. The organization's secretary general, Silvia Sanchez Rico, stands up for the vendors, he told me, against the new government of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. But when the underwear vendor had concluded his speech, and I asked if I could cite his name, he regretfully declined. He was concerned, he told me, that the person on whom he had just heaped so many generous adjectives, Secretary General Sanchez, might find his remarks inadequate -- might even be displeased.

Some people figured that Silvia Sanchez had ordered the mob attack on the shopkeepers' demonstration, in order to block Cardenas's vendor campaign. In an interview with one of the papers, she defended herself gamely by suggesting that if she ever did order a mob attack, it would never be on her own terrain, so as not to bring discredit on herself. In her account, the attack must have been ordered by a rival from one of the other vendor guilds, intent on making her look thuggish and violent -- which is a theory that other people, knowledgeable about the downtown streets, regarded as plausible.

I found her office near a tiny square called the Plaza Roldan, which is only a few blocks from the Zocalo, but might as well be in a country village. A yellow building on the corner slumps like a sack of coffee beans. Through its open portals you see barrels and baskets full of gleaming chilies, dried tamarinds, chickpeas, lentils, sunflower seeds and rice. And across the street stands the headquarters of the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced -- a modest building, recognizable at once by the bold and cheerful sign on the awning, spelling out, in the red, white and green of Mexico's flag, the letters ''PRI.''

Secretary General Sanchez turned out to be a pretty woman, though as wide as she is tall, 41 years old, dressed in a tiger-skin patterned skirt and gold jewelry, with a necklace of glittering stones. The secretary generalship is hers by maternal inheritance, she told me. Her mother opened a lemon stand half a century ago and built up the organization. By now the membership, according to several people, extends to a full 10,000 vendors (meaning the guild must take in something like $4 million a year simply in dues, apart from any commissions that derive from buying and selling). The mother used to amble through the neighborhood, and people would cry out, ''Godmother!'' It was because, the daughter explained, the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced is a kindly guild, not a violent one. The guild pays its members' police fines, helps the sick and buries the dead. It is a guild of people who recognize, as the secretary general said, that ''our ancestors were women of sorrow, who bore sorrow on their shoulders, who knew how to struggle.''

The office is dominated by an impressive bronze bust of Secretary General Sanchez's mother. In a corner stands a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. And there is a remarkable collection of photographs, arrayed on two walls, showing mother and daughter posing next to what seems like every powerful leader of the Government of Mexico and the PRI during the last 30 years, unto President Zedillo. It is a patriotic display.

''We are Mexicans!'' the secretary general told me. She shared none of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas's aversion to demagogic slogans. Her vendor guild is part of the PRI's empire of poor people's organizations, and the populist and nationalist rhetoric of the PRI spills instinctually from her lips. As for Cardenas himself, she told me that she wished for respectful relations, even if he came from -- and now she tried to recall the name of the mayor's Party of the Democratic Revolution. But she couldn't bring it to mind, as if he had sprung from political regions far too marginal and obscure for any reasonable person to recall. ''We all have the right to get ahead,'' she told me -- meaning, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas does not have the right to get in our way.

I enjoyed my interview with the secretary general of the Civic Union of Sidewalk Vendors of the Old Merced -- I enjoyed meeting, at last, an orator full of vim -- but I must say, as I went back into the streets and pushed my way among the swarm of vendors and tiny carpets, it did occur to me that social problems in Mexico City have a depth and augustness that you don't find everywhere. I was struck, as sooner or later everyone is in Mexico, by the fact that nothing is what it seems. Even a problem as straightforward as clearing out the sidewalk vendors can turn out to be hopelessly clogged with strange institutions and ancient habits. I came away thinking that, to know whether Cardenas's sidewalk-vendor policies (or any of his policies, or the struggle for democracy itself) are likely to get very far, you would need a keen sense of Mexico's history and social structures and customs. You would need a keen sense even to know who is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the melancholy sphinx. Yet Mexico's history and social structures and customs are famously veiled and difficult to interpret.

Three days before the vendor riot, the poet octavio paz died. The death was regarded as a national tragedy, mourned with a passion that would be inconceivable in a country like the United States, where many more people read books, and literature is much less esteemed. Paz's wavy hair and double chin were everywhere in the week that followed -- on the cover of every magazine and newspaper, and on television. He was celebrated for his poetry, his Nobel Prize, his essays on art and literature, his political analyses, his protest against the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1968 -- but, most of all, for his insights into the Mexican soul.

Even the city council, from under its pile of urban calamities, devoted a session to celebrating the dead poet, with Cardenas perched in the seat of honor and a military band braying the national anthem from the upstairs gallery. I had read some of Paz, and had liked what I read, by and large. But when the ceremony ended, I discovered that, by a happy circumstance, the city council and Mexico City's secondhand bookstore district occupy the same busy street, and, with a few purchases up and down the block, I found myself in a position to like Octavio Paz at much greater length.

The key thing with Paz, I have discovered, is to read his poems in chronological order, beginning in the 1930's and advancing into the late 1950's, when he reached his height. Reading him in that way, you see that, for all the surrealist fireworks in his poetry (the night is always flashing green, and 10 different movies seem to be playing at once), he tells a simple story from one poem to the next. It is the story of a man who feels trapped in a maze of his own self-consciousness -- almost as if he were two men, not one. The man in these poems walks down a city street, unable to break out of his own thoughts, listening to the footsteps of another man, who turns out to be himself. He wishes he could get himself to stop playing those dialectical little mind-games. He can't. Who am I? he wonders. The earth around him is parched and full of stones, and the sun is brutal. He flees into a drowsy insomnia, not quite asleep, not quite awake.

Through half-shut eyes, he begins to notice that some of those arid stones surrounding him are the ruins of ancient temples. He begins to feel that he himself is an ancient soul, and that ancient times and modern times coexist. He feels a rush of passion and lucidity -- feels in his own pulse the rhythm of those carved-stone Mayan calendars, where the rays of a giant sun go beaming murderously in all directions. Paz can get fairly frenzied when he gets into that mood, banging his tom-tom and chanting his chants. And the Mexico that he describes looks a good deal like the troubled man in those poems -- a Mexico uncomfortable in its own skin; unsure about its identity; conscious of having an ancient past, but unable to get that past clearly into focus, except now and then through accidents of imagination; a Mexico suffused with stony grandeur, and with puzzlement; a Mexico that feels itself to be two Mexicos at once, ancient and modern.

Could that be right? You could easily dismiss Paz's description as a poet's fantasy. Yet eventually you do begin to notice that in Mexico there are two magnificent sources of cultural inspiration instead of one, and the two sources are all entangled, without having entirely merged. There is a luxuriously aristocratic high culture, whose roots lead back to imperial Spain and to Jesuit savants and the Catholic orders. And there is a weirdly vivid folk culture, whose roots lead back to the Indian empires and to scary religions that long ago disappeared. The mixing of those two inspirations makes for a fantastic richness in Mexican life, which you can see anywhere you set your eyes, from the loftiest of high arts to the humblest of peddler carts, with their intense blue and red painted designs. But then again, if you look at the economy and the social structures, you see that same twoness, only this time without anything positive to be said about it.

For in Mexico there has always been an economy of the rich, whose distant origins reach back to the modernizing impulses of Europe; and an economy of the poor, whose distant origins reach back to the medieval part of what the Spaniards brought to Mexico, and to the old Indian cultures. There are modern and efficient farms for the rich, and traditional communal lands for the poor; modern merchandising for the rich, run by rent-paying and tax-paying shopkeepers, and traditional market-vending for the poor. And each sector of that fatefully split economy obeys its own customs and cannot comprehend the other sector, except as an enemy -- exactly as in the streets behind the Zocalo, where the shopkeepers and the vendor mafias represent rival economies and not just two social classes within a single economy.

In Paz's interpretation, the riddle of Mexican history has always been to bring those two Mexicos together in the name of something grander than either. In Spanish colonial times, the Catholic Church tried to do exactly that -- and succeeded, in the realm of the spirit. In the 19th century the Mexican liberals tried again -- and they, too, succeeded, in the realm of unenforceable political rights. But the first effort to succeed on any more substantial terrain came about only with the Revolution of 1910 -- and even then, civil wars and hard decades had to come and go before a great hero stepped forward and knew what to do. That event, the historic turn in Mexico's sense of itself, took place in 1934, the year of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas's birth, when his father, General Lazaro Cardenas, became President of the Republic. Lazaro Cardenas tried to bestow on all of Mexico the same mestizo quality, Indian and Spanish, that he had already bestowed on his son's name.

He took the communal lands of the Indians and the peasants, and tried to modernize them. He nationalized the American oil companies. He took the party that would eventually be called the PRI and made it an organization for everyone, from the most powerful of generals to the poorest of the poor -- a mass party for a single-party state (though in Lazaro Cardenas's system there was always room for opposition parties, too, so long as the opposition agreed never to win any elections). He was a forward-looking socialist, and, at the same time, an old-fashioned feudal strongman. And everything he did worked well enough -- not just during the years of his own presidency, from 1934 to 1940, but for the next few decades. Industry grew. Poverty diminished. The arts blossomed. In the riddle of Mexican history, Lazaro Cardenas was the solution -- the man who showed how two might become one, with benefit for all.

Who is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, then? He is the heir to the solution to the riddle of the history of Mexico. He is the son of the man who rescued Mexico from the stony solitude that Paz describes in his poems. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas does not have to be eloquent. His first name (which is that of the last Aztec emperor) and last name (which is that of the greatest of all Mexican Presidents) are already a poem. The downward turn of his lips speaks for centuries of suffering without his saying a word. He has only to let himself be seen for millions of Mexicans to remember the hope for a better future that was brought to them by his father.

The single most passionate sentence that I have found in Cuauhtemoc's writings and published interviews is this, from an essay about Lazaro Cardenas, which came out just last year: ''I want, now, to remember him above all as a father, as first and foremost my father, even beyond the appreciation and admiration I have for the patriot, for the revolutionary, for the expropriator of oil, for the opponent of war, for the loving husband, for the leader of the agrarian reform, for the extremely affectionate father-in-law and grandfather, for the champion of the indigenous people, for the lover of trees and nature, for the creative cattleman, for the man who was untiring, visionary, generous and good.'' And so the son's heart beats for the father, and every step taken by the son is lighted by the father's torch.

Cuauhtemoc rose easily in his father's party -- he received government contracts as a young civil engineer, then government appointments; he became senator, under secretary of forests and governor of the state of Michoacan in the 1980's, in each case, through top-down nomination by the PRI leaders. Yet the son's destiny was to notice ever more clearly, as the years rolled on, that his father's intentions were not being realized. The PRI did not become the party of all the people. On the contrary, in 1968 the students in Mexico City demonstrated for more democracy, and the PRI called out the army and staged a horrific massacre, which drove the universities and whole portions of the educated middle class into the fractured ranks of the Marxist left. The communal lands never did prosper, except in a few cases.

Beginning in the 1980's, the economy as a whole began to falter, especially for the poor. And finally, in 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, alone among the famous names of the PRI, astonished the country by bolting his father's party. He joined up with a raggedy coalition of left-wing mini-organizations -- the hot little groups that had come out of the student rebellion of 20 years earlier, together with a democratic-minded remnant of the old Communist Party. In the first of his races against the PRI, he ran for President as the candidate of the left-wing coalition. He lost that election -- either because he actually won, and the PRI vote-counters committed a fraud through a purported computer crash, or because he lost fair and square, and the PRI vote-counters committed a fraud anyway, just to be sure. Carlos Salinas, the PRI candidate, became President. And the sweetly comfortable life that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had led until that moment came to an end.

He devoted the next few years to shaping the left-wing coalition into his Party of the Democratic Revolution. He brought in the Maoists, the Trotskyists, and some of the ex-Communists, and he managed to merge them with the oil workers of Veracruz and other bits and pieces of his father's old coalition from the 1930's, though he never could bring in some of the intellectuals of the moderate left. But the new party had its troubles. President Salinas orchestrated a propaganda campaign against Cardenas, who was made to look like a wild-eyed radical. Meanwhile another kind of campaign, surging from the grass roots, without central direction, went after Cardenas's supporters.

It was a campaign of murder -- which has gone mostly unpunished in Mexico and is virtually unknown in the United States. The murders began even before the 1988 election, and gathered momentum afterward. According to the estimates that Cardenas gave me, some 300 supporters of his party were killed during the six years of the Salinas presidency, followed by another 200 in the years since then. (These are figures that Joel Solomon, research director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch, regards as conceivable. ''Being a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution has been very dangerous,'' he says.) Most of the victims were peasants, killed one or two or three at a time in the endless violence of the countryside, where political murders barely cause a stir, even within the party that has endured the losses. Cardenas himself seems to know very little about these people, though I pressed him about it. But the killings wore his party down and had the additional perverse effect of draping a flag of violence over the entire project of overthrowing the PRI. The next presidential election took place in 1994, and Cardenas ran again, this time against Salinas's political heir, Zedillo, and against a candidate from the right-wing National Action Party.

This time Cardenas was trounced, even without a computer crash. Yet even as the presidential campaign proceeded, and the Salinas administration completed its term, and the new Zedillo administration got under way -- even as the PRI demonstrated one more time its smooth efficiency at staying in office -- the calamities of 1994 began to unfold. There were the Zapatistas and the peso and the crime wave in Mexico City, and all the rest, which made the PRI look ever uglier. And Cuauhtemoc Cardenas quietly added one more element to his political appeal. He had always presented himself as his father's heir -- as the man who would always defend the ancient communal lands and never privatize the oil industry. But in the mid-90's the democratic wave that had already washed halfway across the earth finally began to reach Mexico, and Cardenas was able to present himself as the exponent of the most up-to-date ideas about democracy, too.

You could wonder about the gap between those two impulses, his democratic modernizing idea and his nostalgic left-wing populism. The democratic reformer in him was the champion of strict adherence to law, equally for everyone; and the left-winger and populist in him was the champion of all kinds of disparate causes with an uncertain relation to law -- the cause of the Zapatistas and their armed rebellion, for instance (though he urged the Zapatistas to become a civic organization). In order to square these contradictory impulses, he needed what every left-winger is looking for in Latin America today and has not yet found: a new political program, some novel and convincing way to stand for a better future without seeming to stand for the failures of the past. But no such formula was at hand. So he proceeded like an old-fashioned coalition-builder, and added his new modernizing appeal to his old nostalgic appeal, and subtracted nothing, and didn't trouble himself too much about contradicting himself. That was good enough, pragmatically speaking. His popularity increased, and with it, his ability to withstand persecution.

It may be that, in those years, democratic ideas began to spread even into the PRI, at least into its higher reaches. President Zedillo began to speak in a more democratic language, doubtless out of a recognition that, in changing times, there have to be new methods of staying in power. Maybe Nafta contributed to the new mood, at least to the extent of making Zedillo and his colleagues leery of offending the United States with any more ham-handed computer crashes. In Cardenas's estimation, a fear of the American response did, in fact, keep the PRI honest during the elections of 1997. Just now the campaign to restore their own popularity has pushed the PRI leaders to adopt a system of primary elections within their own party -- an unheard-of development in what was always a top-down authoritarian machine. And the system that has governed Mexico for most of this century -- Lazaro Cardenas's system, the system that was supposed to turn the two Mexicos into one, and didn't -- became, for the first time, vulnerable to overthrow, democratically.

What does it all add up to, now that Cardenas has spent a good six months in City Hall battling the PRI and its sidewalk vendors and defending his father's populism and making laconic statements about respect for law? I put that question to Cardenas's leading national rival outside of the PRI -- Vicente Fox, the Governor of Guanajuato, who is already running for President as a candidate of the right-wing National Action Party. Fox spoke of Cardenas, from across the ideological divide, with a good deal more respect than he granted to any of the leaders of the PRI. ''I recognize him fully as being one of the great contributors to democracy in Mexico,'' Fox said, though he hastened to credit his own party too.

But from Fox's point of view, Cardenas has nothing more to offer. ''He has no project, he has no talent, he has no vision beyond looking backward. If we Mexicans let him have the country, the country will have to go back to 1930 -- back to the communal lands, back to populism, back to the domination of a strong state, and back to the old socialist policy of taking away from some to give to others.'' That was the raillery of a political opponent, and shouldn't be taken too seriously, except as a challenge to Cardenas to define his new-style leftism more precisely.

How can Cardenas offer any such definition, though? Now that he is Mayor, his own actions have to speak on his behalf. Yet the actions, his municipal reforms, seem lost in inertia. Possibly that is because Mexico City's problems would overwhelm any mayor, or possibly it is because the PRI has outmaneuvered him, with its army of storefront organizers and vendor mafias and party-run trade unions. But the problem may also be that Cardenas and his Party of the Democratic Revolution are befuddled by their own mix of populism and legalist severity, and simply don't know what to do, apart from trying to rip up the corrupt old institutions of the PRI.

To present himself as the new solution to the riddle of Mexican history must be Cardenas's dearest dream. Some of his closest advisers do present him that way. But Cardenas turns out to be the man in Octavio Paz's poems, wandering in his own labyrinth of solitude. He is a man who is loved by many, but cannot explain to the many why they love him or where he intends to take them. A man who inspires people, but also deflates them. A man of hope, who leaves his admirers in a fatalist mood. You could almost conclude -- if your expectations of Cardenas were very high, and if you wanted to see Mexico undergo a full-scale revolution, which might be a good idea -- that, at this early stage, he is failing.

But then, if you did look for a revolution, what would be a reasonable standard for measuring its success? On the day after Cardenas's electoral triumph last year, Octavio Paz published a political commentary called ''The New Epoch'' in La Reforma. It was the last article Paz saw into print before lapsing into the final phase of his illness. Paz, in his later years, tended to sympathize with President Zedillo, though not in any formal or rigid way. He sympathized with him, mostly because he worried about disorder, and because he thought that Zedillo had chosen a suitably moderate pace of reform (and perhaps, too, because Paz was vain, and enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the powerful and receiving his share of favors). In any case, Paz did not admire Cardenas. And once the returns had come in and Cardenas had been elected Mayor, the poet worried.

He worried that, in the days to come, Cardenas and his triumphant allies were going to act like left-wing sectarians, and the leaders and rank-and-filers of the defeated PRI were going to undermine the democracy that had brought about their own defeat, and all hell was going to break loose. Paz asked everyone to reflect on the experiences of a democratic President in 1910, whose administration ended in civil war. And he soberly advised everyone in the Mexico of 1998, winners and losers alike, to behave with a civic spirit and a lowered temper.

Today it's easy to see the realism in Paz's fears. The mob attack on Calle Corregidora showed that, in Mexico City, the old PRI institutions are fully capable of turning violent if they feel challenged. In Chiapas, the standoff between the forces of the PRI and the Zapatista guerrillas has gotten more murderous, during the last few months. Things could perfectly well get worse in Mexico. And yet, on a national scale, things have not gotten worse.

Instead, Mexico appears to be easing itself, one dainty toe at a time, into democratic waters. It ought to be obvious that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, more than President Zedillo, deserves the credit -- even if Zedillo has had the wisdom to refrain from committing any gruesome enormities when elections have gone against his own party. It was Cardenas who shook up the political system back in 1988 by turning against the PRI and making his own race for president. It was Cardenas who endured the years of insults and violence that came after 1988, and refused to be discouraged, and kept on running for office. And it was Cardenas who, by getting elected Mayor, demonstrated to ordinary Mexicans that power can alternate from one party to another, not just in faraway states near the American border but in the capital city, without leading the country into civil war or political violence. Isn't that a revolution -- at least the first step toward a revolution, in the field of party politics?

Paz was right to call for a civic spirit and a lowered temper. Cardenas, in his half year in office, has delivered exactly that -- no more, and no less. The revolution, in its first step, turns out to be evolution -- halting, uninspired and partial. And yet in the history of Mexico, there has never been a more democratic moment.